Melanie Martinez - Zzzz (2015)

Melanie Adele Martinez was born on 28 April 1995 in Astoria, Queens, moving to Baldwin, New York, on Long Island, when Martinez was four. She attended Plaza Elementary School, crediting her teacher Mr. Nadien with teaching her how to sing, and in kindergarten she began writing poetry. At fourteen she taught herself how to play guitar by studying chord diagrams of songs she enjoyed, and she wrote her first song by adding her poetry to one of the chord diagrams. In 2012, during her junior year of high school, she participated in the MSG Varsity Talent Show, a televised talent competition, but was eliminated in the second round. She then auditioned for the third season of 'The Voice' in an untelevised open call, held at Javits Center, and several months after the initial audition, while at Roosevelt Field Mall, she received word that she had advanced to the second round. After multiple callbacks she was finally selected to audition on the show itself, singing Britney Spears' 'Toxic', with three of the four judges hitting their "I Want You" button, and Adam Levine being chosen to be her coach. After working her way through the Battle Round, the Knockout Round and the the Live Rounds, she was eliminated by audience vote in week five. After the show, Martinez began working independently on original material, which she says she spent the majority of 2013 writing, and she released her debut single, 'Dollhouse', in February 2014. In April she signed to Atlantic Records and released her debut EP, also called 'Dollhouse', a month later on 19 May 2014. In June 2015, she released the single 'Pity Party', which sampled Lesley Gore's 'It's My Party', and followed this with 'Soap' and 'Sippy Cup' as tasters for her debut album 'Cry Baby', which was released on 14 August 2015. 

It was received with moderate critical acclaim and debuted at number 6 on the Billboard 200, later being certified Platinum by the RIAA. In May 2016, she released her second EP, 'Pity Party', exclusively in Ireland, Mexico and the UK, and a month later she announced that she had started working on, and recording, her second album. In November 2016 she released her third EP, 'Cry Baby's Extra Clutter', which was a physical vinyl release of the bonus tracks from 'Cry Baby', as well as 'Gingerbread Man', a Christmas-themed single which was initially released in December 2015 on SoundCloud, but later released as a solo single in January 2016. In October 2016, Martinez released a commercial for her fragrance, Cry Baby Perfume Milk, noting that the "idea for this perfume has been cultivating in my brain since the moment I finished writing 'Cry Baby'", and the perfume was directly distributed by her record label, Atlantic, making them the first record label to distribute a fragrance. On 15 May 2019, she released a teaser trailer for her second album, 'K–12', which was eventually released in September 2019, and debuted at number 3 on Billboard 200. However, it turned out that when she was writing and recording tracks for 'Cry Baby', she had written many more songs than could possibly fit on the album, and as she pretty much took 2016 off to concentrate on her perfume and make-up brands, those songs were consigned to the vaults. When she returned to music in 2018 she wrote all new material for 'K12', and so the 'Cry Baby' out-takes remained unheard until they started to leak onto the internet. Most of them are too good to stay hidden, so I've taken the best of them to compile two more albums which could have bridged the gap between 'Cry Baby' and 'K12', and we start with the enigmatically-named 'Zzzz', adorned with a suitably literal cover. 

Track listing

01 Arts & Crafts
02 Blue Knees (Band Aid)
03 Toy Chest
04 Bombs On Monday Morning
05 Run
06 Schizo
07 99¢ Store
08 Psycho Lovers
09 Zzzz
10 Rotten Milk
11 Where Do Babies Come From
12 Seesaw
13 Coloring Book